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The Most Powerful Women In International Sports 2018

31 March 2018

The Most Powerful Women In International Sports 2018

Fatma Samba Diouf Samoura is one of 10 women in football on Forbes' inaugural list © Damien

No less than 10 women in football have been named on Forbes' inaugural list of the Most Powerful Women in International Sports 2018.

Top spot belongs to Fatma Samba Diouf Samoura, who leads the commercial and operational sides of FIFA. Fatma is the second-most-powerful person in world soccer, behind FIFA president Gianni Infantino, 

Lydia Nsekera of Burundi became the first woman elected to the FIFA Executive Committee in 2013 and for the past nine years she has sat on the International Olympic Committee, whilst Florence Hardouin of France is the first woman to have been elected a member of the executive committee of UEFA.

Marina Granovskaia, Group Managing Director at Chelsea FC is joined by two media members, Barbara Slater, the BBC's first female director of sports and Chinese journalist XinYi Hua, who climbed the ranks from intern to director of the sports department at The Xin Min Evening News.

Moya Dodd played for Australia’s national soccer team, was one of the first women to serve on the FIFA Executive Committee, and now chairs the international organization Common Goal, to develop her sport around the world and is joined on the list by footballers Nadia Nadim and Lieke Martens, the former an Afghan refugee and trainee surgeon who can speak nine languages and plays for Manchester City, the latter, FIFA's current Player of the Year.

Completing the 10 women in football on Forbes' list is Rimla Akhtar MBE, the first Muslim woman to sit on the Football Association Council, and chair of the Muslim Women’s Sport Foundation.

In total the list has 25 candidates ranging in age from 24 to 63 and hailing from 19 countries on six continents.

To see details in full please click on the link here.

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